Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, attempts to cobble together a Labour response
to the Budget, but gets slightly waylaid by jokes about bingo and Eton

Just 24 hours after George Osborne announced his Budget, MPs gathered excitedly in the Commons, eager to find out whether Labour had thought of anything to say about it yet. Ed Miliband had had a go in the chamber on Wednesday, but on the whole most observers felt that, although energetic and impassioned, his 16-minute response lacked one or two crucial elements, e.g. references to the Budget.

Keen as ever to defend his leader, Ed Balls explained to journalists afterwards that Mr Miliband had meant to talk about the Budget, but discovered on the day that much of the script he’d prepared was irrelevant, and so “had to fill the space by going on and on about Michael Gove”.

Still, today was a new day. Perhaps Mr Balls would do better. He took to the dispatch box, flourishing Tory chairman Grant Shapps’s much-admired poster about beer and bingo (slogan: “I Say, This Is the Sort of Thing You People Like, Isn’t It?”).

The shadow chancellor’s elite joke-writing squad had toiled through the night. And they hadn’t let him down. “Apparently when the Chancellor told the PM he wanted to cut taxes for Bingo,” shouted Mr Balls, “the PM thought he was referring to an old school chum!”

Emboldened by the success of this sally, he reeled off several more, including one that imagined Mr Shapps visiting the north of England and discovering with amazement that the houses had indoor lavatories. Eventually, though, the merriment was brought to a halt by a polite intervention from the Tory MP for Gainsborough, Sir Edward Leigh. “If we could gently return to the Budget…”

Ah yes, the Budget. Mr Balls was presumably just coming to that. After bingo, the most-discussed announcement in the Budget had concerned pension reform. What, now that he’d had a day to reflect, was the shadow chancellor’s verdict?

“We will,” he revealed, “look at the proposals carefully.” (Translation: “Despite hours of scratching our heads we haven’t found a way to rubbish the proposals yet.”)

Apart from that, his response to the Budget – rather like Mr Miliband’s, oddly enough – consisted largely of jokes about poshness, privilege and public school. The Government was “a right old Eton mess”, he gurgled, but at least Mr Osborne wasn’t an Old Etonian toff – “He only went to St Paul’s!”

Mr Balls, incidentally, was educated at Nottingham High School – a fee-paying independent. No doubt it is a hotbed of bingo-playing excellence.

Also in the Commons, MPs remembered Tony Benn. The most memorable tribute came from his fellow Labour veteran, Dennis Skinner. He was near-delirious with nostalgia, but somehow incoherence made his speech all the more touching. “He was a clever man!” he cried at one point, eyes wide in wonderment. “He was clever! That’s what he was!” Then, with a gurgle of admiration: “He could have built a computer!”

One for the headstone. “Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn, 1925-2014. He Could Have Built a Computer.”